Shadowban
2024 · 10m · Ireland
Directed by Shane W. Brennan
Late on Halloween night, wannabe-influencer Fiona live-streams her deliveries down Ireland's ancient roads — until her car's sensors start acting strangely at a mysterious traffic light.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The influencer-haunted-by-algorithm angle *should* be insufferable, but Brennan commits to the strangest possible reading—that the supernatural threat is less ghost story than glitched infrastructure, which is genuinely disorienting in ways most horror won't dare.
A competent genre exercise in the folk-horror lineage, though it trades the considered pacing of its tradition for TikTok-era jump cuts; the formal restraint needed to make that traffic light genuinely uncanny gets swallowed by the premise's own viral hunger.
The decision to let the car's sensor malfunction become the actual horror—treating digital failure as something that *feels* alive—is the kind of specific technical choice that transforms a thin premise into something genuinely unsettling on a shoestring budget.
Festivals
- Spooktacular Film Fest for Horror & Sci-Fi, Official Selection